The savage journey’s full of forks…
This ramble is a reflection on some thoughts after attending the itSMF’s NY LIG meeting yesterday morning…
Kudos go to the speakers who have been on the ITIL road for over 5 years with large, global enterprises. I thought it was interesting that even with this longevity there was still discussion about the level of management commitment; testimony that the savage journey rolls on…’continuous improvement’ sounds so much better, doesn’t it?
Anyway, the highlight of the morning for me was watching each speaker’s face at the end of the session as they were bombarded by a horde of consultants (me included), tool vendors and peers…
“Hi, I just wanted to give you a card and let you know if you ever need…” as their eyes got glassy I thought, “God, I remember…they have to go back to that rat hole and listen to IT SUCKS”…forgive me!
Interesting that the #1 thing they’d do better was understand the business process…that says SLM to me. Only thing I don’t understand is that all the talk around SLM centers on the Service Catalog, when it is a service-oriented event monitoring and management umbrella that is likely to save more time & money.
The lack of focus on monitoring and event management, particularly application monitoring, just seems odd to me…I wish it were more a topic of discussion.
The lack of the ability to automatically isolate the source of anomalies across distributed network, system and application tiers inhibits a wide breadth of IT service management processes.
Business processes will ultimately drag you into transactions and data flows, and simple response time monitoring is a reactive approach to management. IT can no longer afford to be reactive.
Effective monitoring can also help address the ‘disconnect’ between SDLC (app dev) and infrastructure. I have worked with customers who have very effectively leveraged monitoring to enhance Incident, Problem, Release and Capacity Management with excellent results.
SLM will certainly require a Service Catalog, but let’s not do in Service Delivery what we did in Service Support (CMDB); focus so close on one element that we forget other (very important) ones. Like monitoring...integrated network, system and application layer monitoring.
So, what’r YOU lookin’ at?